VOLUME VII: Tea Dance Tent, Sedalia, Missouri

For a few days every June, the downtown streets of Sedalia ring with the sound of its history. It spills out over sidewalks from department-store loudspeakers. It comes from performance tents and tiny alleyway stages and out the open doors of the local piano store. From a distance, it floats to you through the air like scent, coming in fragments that you can't help trying to identify. It's ragtime in its cradle. At Second Street and Ohio, the main drag, is an immense mural of ragtime's big daddy and Sedalia's most famous son, Scott Joplin. Under this is the Tea Dance Tent, home for the duration of the Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival to vintage dancing and music. On the last big day of the event, the tent was a draw, alive with music from the tight six-piece Turpin Tyme Ragsters. They played Charles Johnson's "Crazybone Rag," a tuba- and trombone-heavy take on Joplin's "Entertainer," "Aunt Hagar's Blues" by W.C. Handy.

Catch the Ragsters playing some of "Crazybone Rag" under the Tea Dance Tent:

Coming up the street it sounded like a carnival, sprightly and stately at once. When the striped canvas tent came into view, you half expected to find a merry-go-round underneath instead of the sea of dancers and the warm flashes of the band's brass. In counterpoint to the music and whoops of the crowd was the steady hushing of dancers' feet on the tent's pieced plywood floor - "shhh" "shhh" "shhh" "shhh." Moving in large counterclockwise circles some of these dancers were in period garb - button-up kid-leather shoes, straw boaters, parasols and knee pants - fully investing themselves in a time trip back to the turn of the century. The afternoon wore on, and lessons began under the guidance of the Dance Master, Professor Desmond. First a plea for "more dancers on the floor" then running directions for a "Paul Jones" mixer dance - "Form a large circle. Two step. Promenade. Forward and back. Face partners. Grand right and left...Paul Jones!" (change partners). Among the pairs spinning on the floor, one stood out. In their later years, they were decidedly youthful - he trim and agile in narrow-legged white jeans and a crisp cotton shirt, she graceful in high heels with her long hair falling around her shoulders - as if they simply had never found time to change into old-folks clothes and manners. This year ragtime celebrates 100 years since its first publication. Next year the couple will celebrate 50 since their wedding day. And they will return to Sedalia to dance, where they first learned the steps, in a celebration of their own and of larger history and traditions. There's something to be said for things that last.